Juggling act

He's a writer, he's a director, he's an Oscar-winning actor with an Oscar-winning wife. He's also Hollywood's most vociferous anti-war campaigner - a constant thorn in the side of the American Neocons. And now he's bringing his own political satire to the London stage. Andrew Anthony meets the player who refuses to play the game.

At immigration control in Los Angeles airport a couple of weeks ago, I submitted to the bureaucratic ordeal that now routinely greets British visitors to America. When I finally convinced the customs officer that I was not seeking employment, asylum or the destruction of the free world, she asked me who it was I had come to interview. Tim Robbins, I replied. 'But,' she said, a look of bemusement lending sudden animation to her expressionless face, 'he hasn't got a movie coming out.' I told her that I was there to talk to him about a play he had written. 'Right,' she nodded, then supplied a little cautionary advice: 'Just don't be taken in by his politics.'

Only in America is it no surprise to find a state official who is aware of a film actor's latest output, and only in America would that actor's political pronouncements inspire that official to issue a warning, almost as a condition of entry. It's hard to overstate the prominence of movie stars in US culture. It's often been said that they are the nearest equivalent to royalty and, as with the royal family here, they can be forgiven almost anything but an opinion.

On the whole, Americans will accept their politicians behaving like actors - thus Ronald Reagan became president and Arnold Schwarzenegger has morphed from Terminator to governor of California without a noticeable diminution in respect for his abilities - but they don't much like their actors coming on like politicians. And Robbins, a vociferous opponent of the war in Iraq, is seen by many of his fellow citizens as way too political.

Dating back through 'Hanoi' Jane Fonda's exploits in the anti-Vietnam War movement to the McCarthy witch-hunt in the Fifties, there is something about so-called Hollywood liberals - the disjunction perhaps of pampered multimillionaires identifying with the oppressed peoples of the world - that brings froth to the mouths of many middle Americans, and in particular conservative media commentators. With the possible exception of Michael Moore, no one winds up radio talk-show hosts quite as reliably as Robbins.

At the same time, for a certain kind of progressive cosmopolitan, Robbins is a hero, a man who speaks his mind regardless of the ensuing vilification. With his partner, the actress Susan Sarandon, he has often criticised the American government, both Democrat and Republican. A few years ago, he and Sarandon used their spot at an Oscars ceremony to bring attention to the plight of Haitian immigrants with HIV interned at Guantanamo Bay. The fuss that caused was more 'Here he goes again'. No one really questioned his patriotism.

Last year, however, the couple was disinvited to the Baseball Hall of Fame's celebration to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the film Bull Durham, the baseball comedy in which Robbins met Sarandon. Robbins saw it as a concerted attempt to inhibit free speech. As if to prove that he won't be gagged by the threats to his social life, he has written a play called Embedded, a satire which mocks the compliant role of the American media in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq and takes broad aim at sinister forces within the Bush administration.

On Tuesday, the play will be staged in London, having already drawn sell-out audiences in New York and Los Angeles. When I met up with Robbins at the Sony Pictures studio lot in Culver City, he was in the middle of editing a video of the play that is to be shown at the Venice Film Festival.

At 6ft 4in, and 45 years of age, Robbins maintains an unlikely but inseparable relationship with the adjective 'boyish'. Though his hair is now more salt than pepper, and his fleshy protean features appear to have belatedly set, there's something elastic in the way he holds himself, not quite gangly but unmistakably youthful. It's in his smile, however, a shy heartwarming gesture that you can never see quite enough of, that his adolescence is most effectively preserved.

Part of the reason that you want more of the smile is that Robbins, for all his comic ability, can be self-consciously serious. He makes it clear that he doesn't go in for Hollywood gossip. Indeed, he takes every opportunity to remind me that he doesn't go in for Hollywood. He and Sarandon and their three children live in the more bohemian environment of downtown New York.

For all his size, he does not occupy space like a celebrity. There's no force field of fame. He's approachable, if not particularly accessible. He wears jeans and a T-shirt with the legend 'The Actors Gang', the theatre group he founded in the early Eighties. The son of Gil Robbins, a member of the Highwaymen folk group, Robbins developed his twin interests in theatre and politics at an early age. He went on anti-Vietnam War marches as a kid and, when a teenager, set up an improvisational troupe with his sisters called Theatre of the New City. One of their productions was a satire on Watergate.

He studied drama at UCLA and moved swiftly into TV with parts in soaps like St Elsewhere. His progress in film was not so rapid. It was not until he was 30 that his gawky charm was properly captured in Bull Durham. But it was Robert Altman's Hollywood satire The Player, in which he played a slick, paranoid studio executive, that his lead potential was seen. He then went on to write and direct and star in a political mockumentary, Bob Roberts, in which he played a folk-singing right-wing political candidate, an achievement that led Altman to suggest that he could be 'the next Orson Welles'. Since then, he's directed the acclaimed Dead Men Walking and starred in an impressive range of films, from the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy to the slow-burn hit The Shawshank Redemption. Earlier this year he deservedly won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his haunting performance as a grown-up victim of child abuse in Mystic River.

He's still artistic director of the Actors Gang, and though he's been accused of autocratic management, it is from this LA-based theatre group that he recruited most of the US cast for Embedded.

'Once a year,' he tells me, 'I do a training thing with all the new actors. In order to do the workshop you have to be an intern and help out in the theatre, and in return they get free training. I come in and do intensive 10-hour days for six days straight.' He looks tired, heavy lidded, and talks in a half-formed sentences punctuated by hippyisms. 'I don't think I've ever been so busy in my life,' he explains. 'It's really cool.' He runs me through his schedule for the next month, which includes acting, editing, visits to London (to prepare but not perform in Embedded) and Venice, and finally a brief tour supporting Pearl Jam with his weekend band Gob Roberts as part of an effort to register voters for the presidential election in November.

'We started this band last summer and played some at the Sundance film festival in the winter,' he says and flashes one of his semi-embarrassed smiles. 'We do mostly Bob Roberts songs electrified and amplified. It's just pure unadulterated fun.'

But before the fun, there's Embedded, which he says he was inspired to write following his experience in London filming Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 during the build-up to the war in Iraq. 'I was getting the impression that there was a debate, because I was reading London papers. I was getting balance. Even in the Times - isn't that owned by Murdoch - if they presented the WMD side, they presented the other side too: journalism, what we have come to mourn the loss of in America.'

He says that the American media coverage was all about 'fear-mongering, propaganda, demonising', and compares its uniformity to Soviet news reporting. He then explains that while, in the wake of 9/11, he could not bring himself to protest against the war in Afghanistan, he did not agree with the strategy of 'indiscriminate bombing'. If he had been president, he 'would have trained special ops to go do the job right' and not interfered with Afghanistan sovereignty. 'The democratic movement in any country has got to happen on its own. It's never going to happen through bombs and airplanes. Never going to happen that way.'

Various aspects of this speech strike me as naive or fantastic (not least the magical powers of special ops), but for the sake of historical accuracy I merely point out that there is a historical precedent for bombs and airplanes bringing democracy.

'How? When?' He sits up, suddenly rattled.

I mention Germany and Japan in the Second World War.

'It seems to be that we always come back to that. I don't know it didn't happen without the determination of the people involved.'

I point out that it didn't happen in East Germany, and he replies: 'I'd have to go into the history and the specifics of that. It came at the end of the gun but with the influx of a huge amount of money: the Marshall Plan. In Iraq, the money is going into war-mongering. It has nothing to do with democracy. It's about destabilisation. That's what Kosovo was about. It's the same thing any time there's a threat to US national security.' This is not the typical conversation one has with American film actors, and I feel a professional obligation to steer it back to more familiar territory such as marital infidelity and substance abuse (neither of which appear to loom large in the Robbins biography) but I recall something he had said in an interview some years back. 'The only responsibility I have to anyone is to make sure that when I talk about something, I know what I'm talking about, that I've done the research. I take that responsibility very seriously. I read a lot.'

So I ask how Kosovo was a threat to US security.

'Ahm...' he hesitates. 'I believe... I'm not the right person to talk about this... but that region of the world, this is the way I've heard it put... Can I go get a cigarette?' He disappears and, as if having remembered his Noam Chomsky, returns a minute later with a ready-fit anti-imperialist answer. 'Where it's all flawed is this hegemonic belief that if you bring business to a country it will help them.'

Leaving aside what he had said a moment earlier about the Marshall Plan, I say that when I visited Kosovo it was less about bringing business than preventing communal bloodshed.

'I'm ignorant on this subject,' he admits, without bluster. 'I'd have to read up on it.' He returns to Iraq, a subject on which he has done a fair amount of reading. Contradicting himself once again, he repeats the line that the Iraq war was a neoconservative plot hatched in 1989 by Bush advisers who believed 'they could spread democracy. They thought they were altruistic' - so not about destabilisation after all - 'They were wrong.'

Robbins is not a politician and it is therefore a little unfair to parse his words, teasing out the contradictions and inconsistencies. But his muddled thinking, in which the only continuum is that American foreign policy is always bad, informs his writing as a dramatist. He shows me a scene that he's editing from Embedded that is both pretentious and simple-minded - not a happy combination - and is reminiscent of the worst shouty agitprop.

With admirable foresight, he is not planning on good reviews in London. 'It would be nice to get embraced by a critical community, but we're not expecting it. It was word of mouth in New York. We're doing a populist theatre.'

In the scene I see, a 'cabal' of neocons, including caricatures of Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, sit around in commedia masks detailing their conspiracy to run the world. Robbins talks eloquently about the use of masks, something he picked up from the Theatre du Soleil. 'The tendency when expressing emotion is to be too frantic,' he says. 'So we're trying to get people to settle and trust their emotions. What's important is what comes through the eyes.'

The problem is that it's hard to imagine a more frantic style of acting than that on display in Embedded. The actors deliver their lines with the exuberance of people taking part in a celebration of political solidarity rather than a satirical drama. I suggest to Robbins that such theatre has to contend with the charge of 'preaching to the converted', and indeed I can't imagine many visitors to the Riverside Studios looking to have their prejudices challenged.

'That's one of the lines that's always in reviews,' he says a little wearily. 'And "sophomoric" and "didactic". It's a non-criticism. First of all, it's not true. My answer is: who's the choir? Who's the converted? An awful lot of liberals supported that war. Even if there was a choir it was way out of tune. They were not singing together. So even if it were true, it's OK.'

Since Robbins first started protesting against the war, American politics, and its reporting in the media, has undergone the beginnings of a sea change. It's no longer seen as un-American to question aspects of the US-led occupation in Iraq. I wonder if Robbins had detected a more loquacious mood among fellow actors in Hollywood. 'I don't know,' he says a little tersely. 'I don't live here. I don't know this world. I don't go to the parties. I can't speak for them.'

This sounds like a mechanical answer, designed to confirm his position as the celebrity anti-celebrity, the Hollywood player who refuses to play the game. I press him further. 'Look,' he says, 'you can count on one hand the actors in Hollywood who came out against the war. The biggest joke is when people say you do it for attention or your career.'

Doubtless it's not pleasant reading unkind things about yourself in the newspapers or hearing snide jokes on TV, but you sense that Robbins savours his position as the film industry's most outspoken voice.

'I remember thinking,' he goes on, 'when I went to that anti-war rally: OK, the shit's going to fly. But the shit's going to fly inwards if you don't do it. Because you were afraid of what? Being less rich? After the Hall of Fame thing, I was so thankful I lived in New York because you have to walk around. And people came up to me and said "Thank you". Two people said negative things - they were both white men and both in SUVs, and both shouted out the window and drove away. The second time I was able to get one word out and that was: "Enlist."

'Because my essential problem with that war, beyond the politics, is that we're getting the poor people to fight the war, and they were put there by people who got out of military service.'

When he can resist the lure of cheap conspiracy theories - a test that he failed in what I saw of Embedded - Robbins can talk with impressive passion. Here you see the dramatist as orator. You either agree with him or not. However, it's when the activist shapes the actor that Robbins should beware. That's a matter of aesthetics, and there doesn't seem much debate that the beautifully subtle acting of Mystic River wins out every time over the student histrionics of Embedded.

The best-read politico in Hollywood may, as compliments go, rank alongside the tallest pygmy, but there's much to be said for an actor who reads the world's press. And as long as his platform is not the stage, Robbins should not be ridiculed for expressing his views. Even if you don't agree with them.

He tells me that at the Oscars a number of actors came up and whispered to him: '"Thanks for speaking out." They whispered. Why?' He shakes his head and then smiles, a big sparkling dimpled grin that somehow says more about Robbins than any of his speeches could ever begin to articulate.

· Embedded will be at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London W6 (020 8237 1111) from 31 August to 23 October